Arizona State University gives pastor a platform to promote homophobia

by Michael Nugent on October 14, 2012

Remember Steven Anderson, the Phoenix Pastor who in 2009 asked his parishioners to pray that God would kill President Obama, by giving him brain cancer so that he would die like Senator Ted Kennedy? And who followed that up with a radio interview in which he called for gay people to be executed, and insisted that the host of the show, Michelangelo Signorile, must be molesting children because he is gay?

Well, Anderson is still preaching his homophobic hate speech, and now Arizona State University is giving him a platform to do so. Here’s a video that Anderson posted on YouTube earlier this year, in which he is talking to a class at Arizona State University. As an aside, there is an amusing tell at about 4:30 when he starts talking about animals being homosexual, and his legs start involuntarily swinging from side to side under the table.

The homophobic hate speech kicks in at about 5:00. Anderson has been describing homosexuals as people who have been rejected by God and who go after animalistic strange flesh, and a student asks “So, after that point, God no longer loves them as a person?” Anderson replies: “The Bible… I could give you nineteen scriptures right now that talks abut God hating people. And I could give you a whole list of verses where he says I don’t love these people any more, and in fact I hate them. So this myth that God loves everybody is just that, it’s a myth.”

At about 7:00 Anderson says that “Anybody who remotely calls themselves a Bible-believing Christian agrees that that once people die, and go to Hell, it’s too late for them. Well, I’m just saying that the Bible says in many places that it can become too late for a person before that point, sometimes, if they reject Christ enough. And I would say homosexuals fall into that category.”

A student asks if we are supposed to also hate those people, or should we love them as ourselves as Jesus said, and Anderson replies: “But see, that verse doesn’t say love every single person on this planet as yourself. It says love thy neighbor as thyself,” and he then elaborates: “Is Jeffrey Dahlmer my neighbor? Is Adolf Hitler my neighbor? Then I don’t have to love them, do I? So there you go.”

In the comments under the video, one person asked: “Was the professor sitting﻿ there through this?” and Anderson responded “Yes. In one of his other classes, one of the students confronted me with the fact that they were a homo, and I told him that what he does is disgusting, and that everyone else in the class knows it; they just don’t have the guts to say it. I also told him he was a pedophile, and he ran out of the room upset. The teacher﻿ said it was the student’s fault because he already knew where I stood on that subject. What did he expect to happen?!”

So why does Arizona State University give Anderson a platform to promote his homophobic hate speech, and to then boast online about calling a student a pedophile and upsetting him so much that he ran out of his classroom?

So, according to this logic, a “pastor” could say in a classroom that his religion says that people of colour are inferior to whites, and for him to call non-White people animals, and it would be okay because he believes it and the African American students know his beliefs and what did they expect to happen?